I am an artist who loves making sprawling messes and staying up far past anyone’s concept of an acceptable bedtime. I am at my best when my music is loud, my colors are raucous and my live performance actions, video performances, photographs, photograms and collages are just on the verge of bursting out of control. I love the moments of making when my initial concepts and inspirations have not yet lost their intrinsic patterns and programs, but their systems are starting to fail, their interior machines are sputtering and the energy being produced is one of glorious chaotic possibility.
I try to challenge my entrenched assumptions about what is socially acceptable, what makes sense and what is rational. I go for the transgressive, the weird, the hidden. I bow to my instincts for comedy, drama and delight in embracing the pleasant disorientation that can accompany creation. Throughout I rely on my own visual iconography as my guides—lobsters, baby dolls, shrimp, colorful plastic sheeting, text made of sugar cubes, miniature bottles of dishwashing detergent, 1960s terry cloth towels, cooked poultry—as symbols of disconnection with nature, doppelgängers, memento moris, and dreams
gone awry.
My work often finds me in conversation with animals as I explore our shared experiences of grief, dislocation, and lost love. I frequently work with cheaply made, inanimate objects that represent the animal figure, or objects that have been animalized in some way. I use them to explore how I as a living being function within our world of plastic chaos.
And I am frequently naked in my work.
Actually, I think nude bodies are pretty funny; we jiggle.
Anya Liftig’s work has been shown at TATE Modern, MOMA, New Museum, Bronx Museum of Art, Stedelijk Museum and many other venues around the world. Her work has been published and written about in the New York Times Magazine, BOMB, Performance Research, Cultbytes, Theater, Public Culture, Critical Correspondence, Hyperallergic, Slate, PAJ, New York and many more.
Her memoir, Holler Rat, was published by Abrams in 2023 and was a USA Today Bestseller and her artist book, REJECTION: A 25 Year Performance on Ambition, was published by Renous River Press in 2025. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, Franklin Furnace, Mertz Gilmore and the Connecticut Foundation for the Arts and is a graduate of Yale and Georgia State University.
